A common historical feature of virtually all cooperative enterprises, such as a business, group of businesses or business divisions, or governmental or administrative organization of any form, is the sharing of resources among the individuals or groups of individuals therein. It is well known and accepted that the sharing of resources among users reduces the per user cost of the resources, including supply and maintenance costs, and allows a greater range of resources to be made available to the users.
The sharing of resources is a common feature of computer systems and, in particular, is one of the primary reasons for networked computers systems wherein the users share such facilities as storage devices, communications networks, printers, and even applications programs and data files. The sharing of resources, such as supplies and maintenance services, however, is also of benefit for standalone systems used by the members of an organization or group.
To obtain the optimum benefit from shared resources, it is necessary to monitor the usage of the resources to insure that the types, number and capacities of the resources correspond to the needs of the user so that the work of the users is not hampered by lack of a resource and to insure that resources are not underutilized. Such monitoring also allows the efficient scheduling of supplies and maintenance, and can assist in insuring that the resources are used properly for the intended purposes.
The monitoring of resource usage is, however, a persistent problem in contemporary computer systems as the systems are not designed to, and do not, provide the facilities to provide the necessary information in a form and manner to be efficiently and effectively used by a resource administrator. For example, one of the most common shared resources in networked computer systems is printers which, in networked computer systems, are typically connected from a print server system that is accessible to the users of other systems in the network through the network. While print servers and most printers include a spooler mechanism that manages the flow of print jobs through the printer and that generates data pertaining to the jobs, the data is generally inadequate for effective monitoring of the printer usage. That is, the data generated by a print spooler usually records only that a print job was completed or failed, may indicate the date and time a job was submitted or a queue number assigned to the job by the spooler, and may include error messages. In addition, the data normally must be collected from each print server or printer individually and by hand, and the data from individual printers must then collated and merged by hand to provide an overview of printer use in, for example, a department of a corporation. While other types of resources, such as file servers and network controllers, may provide more detailed usage information and may make the information accessible through the network, there are many that have little better facilities for monitoring than are typically provided in printers and print servers.
The present invention provides a solution to these and other problems of the prior art.